Sequencing Every Species on Earth

Recently, researchers called together by the Smithsonian Initiative on Biodiversity Genomics, and the Beijing Genomics Institute, proposed launching a “Earth Biogenome Project,” at first, based on DNA sequencing of all the eukaryote species. As this piece reports: “. . . the first step would be to sequence in great detail the DNA of a member of each eukaryotic family (about 9000 in all) to create reference genomes on par or better than the reference human genome. Next would come sequencing to a lesser degree a species from each of the 150,000 to 200,000 genera. Finally, EBP participants would get rough genomes of the 1.5 million remaining known eukaryotic species. These lower resolution genomes could be improved as needed by comparing them with the family references or by doing more sequencing . . . . “ Of course, most of the living on Earth is done by the prokaryotes many or most of which have never been identified. But the eukaryotes are big enough for a start. MORE